Download Room Brochure - National Gallery of Australia

Ringer
from the Hoarfrost editions
series 1974
lithograph and screenprint
transferred to a collage
of paper bag, silk taffeta,
cheesecloth
215.9 x 121.9 cm
National Gallery of Australia,
Canberra
Purchased 1976
exposed by their new shapes’. 9 The Cardbird series of
1971 is a tongue-in-cheek visual joke, a printed mimic
of cardboard constructions. The labour intensive process
involved in the creation of the series remains invisible to
the viewer – the artist created a prototype cardboard
construction which was then photographed and the image
transferred to a lithographic press and printed before a
final lamination onto cardboard backing. The extreme
complexity of construction belies the banality of the series
and, in this way, Rauschenberg references both Pop’s
Brillo boxes by Andy Warhol and Minimalist boxes such
as those by Donald Judd. By selecting the most mundane
of materials, Rauschenberg once again succeeds in a
glamorous makeover of the most ordinary of objects. This
is an exploration of a new order of materials, a radical
scrambling of the material hierarchy of modernism.
During the 1970s, Rauschenberg’s new international
focus required him to travel to several countries where he
entered into significant collaborations with local artists
and craftspeople. The first was in 1973 with the medieval
paper mill Richard de Bas in Ambert, France. Once again,
Rauschenberg imposed a disciplined stripping back of his
art materials – this time it was not to do with colour but
with the notion of the handmade. In particular, the artist
wanted to engage with handmade paper as one of the
most ancient of artistic traditions. The resulting series,
Pages and fuses, is a group of paper pulp works where
the Pages are formed from natural pulp and shaped into
paper pieces that incorporate twine or scraps of fabric. In
contrast, the Fuses are vivid pulp pieces dyed with bright
pigments. It was precisely this innovative experiment with
paper pulp that sparked a renewed interest in handmade
paper, which inspired major paper works by artists such as
Ellsworth Kelly, David Hockney and Helen Frankenthaler.
Throughout his career, Rauschenberg worked with
fabric in the creation of theatre costumes and stage sets.
In 1974, however, his interest in the inherent properties
of natural materials led him to experiment with the
combination of fabric and printmaking. The Hoarfrost
editions series, created at Gemini GEL, is named after
the thin layer of ice that forms on cold surfaces and was
inspired by Rauschenberg’s observation of printmakers
using ‘large sheets of gauze … to wipe stones and presses
… and hung about the room to dry … how they float in
the air, veiling machinery, prints tacked to walls, furniture’. 10
The imagery of the Hoarfrost editions was drawn from
the Sunday Los Angeles Times and printed onto layers
of silk, muslin and cheesecloth. The artist exploited the
transparent layering of material in order to suspend the
image within the work itself, enabling the viewer to
both look at and look through the work – to see both
the positive space and the negative space in conjunction
with the environment behind the work. Everyday objects,
such as paper bags, are in sophisticated contrast with the
ghostly imprinted imagery and the folds and layers of the
delicate fabric.
Rauschenberg’s quest for continued international
involvement took him to Ahmadabad, India, to work in
a paper mill that had been established as an ashram for
untouchables. Rauschenberg was immediately struck by
the contrast between the rich paper mill owners and the
absolute poverty of the mill workers. The artist’s specific
environment once again provided him with materials and
in 1975 he set about making the Bones and unions series.
For the Bones, the collaborative team wove strips of
bamboo with handmade paper embedded with segments